amber
ROI Calculator

Estimate the Business Impact of AI

See in 60 seconds how much time, money, and productivity amber unlocks for your team — with a personalized ROI you can take straight to your decision-makers.

3-Year ROI
1,069%
Return over 36 months incl. setup and ramp-up
Payback
2.6 months
from contract start to payback
Net over 3 Years
€1.1M
cumulative €1.3M minus €107,000
With 200 employees on the Professional plan, the gross potential is €457,000 per year. After 6 months of ramp-up, amber pays back in 2.6 months.

Assumptions

1Baseline & Setupstarting point
Company

Size of the knowledge-worker team and fully-loaded cost per person.

Employees at a desk job ?All employees who work daily on a PC and regularly search, document or share information — e.g. administration, engineering, consulting, sales, service.200
Fully-loaded cost / FTE / year ?Gross salary + employer contributions + overhead. Rule of thumb: gross annual salary × 1.3 for employer share, social security and holidays.€75,000
amber plan ?The three plans differ mainly in feature set and number of connected systems. Starter for getting started, Professional up to 10 connectors, Business up to 20 connectors plus API access.
Setup & Ramp-up

One-time investment for the rollout and the time until the team reaches full impact.

Setup investment (internal + external) ?One-time investment for the rollout. Includes amber's AI Onboarding package (Customer Success Manager, system setup, fine-tuning) — but more importantly internal effort for integration as well as training and change management for the workforce. The latter is usually the bigger item. Typical range: €5,000 to €50,000.€15,000
Time to full impact ?How long does the team need to reach full impact? The key driver is change management: employees have to learn to use AI as their default path instead of the familiar search habit. For larger workforces, group-by-group roll-out adds to that. Assumption: linear ramp from 0% to 100% over this period. Real-world: 3–6 months.6 months
2Business Casethe value drivers with amber
Search-time savings

Time employees lose every day because they can't quickly find existing knowledge — across email, file shares, SharePoint, Confluence, tickets. amber brings it all into a single search.

Search time / FTE / day ?How much time does a desk-based employee spend searching per day? This is the time lost today because information is scattered across different systems and not centrally searchable.0.5 h
Reduction with amber ?How much of the search time can amber eliminate? Across our customer base, around 40% is a realistic value. In document-heavy industries the reduction is often 50–60%.40%
Onboarding & Knowledge Transfer

Unlike search time: this is about new employees getting up to speed — and about knowledge that would otherwise be lost when people leave (retirement, turnover).

Turnover + retirements / year ?Share of the workforce that needs to be onboarded each year. European average: ~8% turnover. Plus retirements: with a demographically older workforce, closer to 12–15%. This is where experiential knowledge is systematically lost.8%
Time to productivity ?How long until full productivity? Office roles: 8–12 weeks. Complex specialists (engineering, consulting): 16–26 weeks. During this period the new hire delivers only partial output.12 weeks
Reduction with amber ?How much faster do new hires reach productivity when they have expert knowledge, past tickets, best-practice docs and experiential knowledge in a single search? Realistic: 20–35%.25%
Shadow IT & Compliance

Unlike search time and onboarding: this is not about efficiency, but about avoided risk and licence consolidation. Employees often use private AI accounts and feed company and customer data into them — GDPR breaches, confidentiality issues, competitive risk. amber moves this onto a secure, governed platform.

Share of employees with private AI subscriptions ?How many employees use AI tools that bypass IT today? Recent studies: 30–50% of desk-based employees have a private account with an AI vendor and use it for work too. With every prompt, company data can leak in an uncontrolled way.30%
Licence cost / subscription / month ?Many employees today use subscriptions worth around €20 per month — or free tiers where the entered data is used to train the models. With amber, this is consolidated onto a single secure licence.€20
Compliance risk budget / year ?Expected annual loss from data leakage into unauthorised AI tools. Components: GDPR fines (up to 4% of group revenue), contractual penalties from customer NDAs, reputational damage, legal work, forensics. Conservative: €25,000 at 200 employees. Aggressive: 0.5–1% of revenue. With amber, company data stays inside the customer's own tenant — this risk is eliminated.€25,000

Breakdown (calculated over 12 months)

+Value drivers / savings per year
Search-time savings€375,000
Onboarding savings€81,818
−Investment in amber
amber licences per year€30,824
Total value per year€456,818
amber licences per year ?Calculated as selected plan × number of users × tiered price. Current pricing and volume discounts: ambersearch.de/pricing. The estimate here follows the same tiers.− €30,824
Setup investment (one-time)− €15,000
Net per year (at full impact)€425,994
Cumulative cost vs. savings
When the investment pays back — over 36 months.
Cumulative savingsCumulative investmentPayback
€0€660,000€1.3M 0mo6mo12mo18mo24mo30mo36mo Payback: 2.6 months

Note: This calculation does not capture all benefits. Topics such as process automation, AI-assisted document creation and editing, image generation or specialised agents for repetitive tasks come on top. Given the continuous development of amber and the underlying AI models, significantly larger value drivers can be expected in the coming years.

Important: For these additional benefits, the rough approximation of this calculator is not sufficient. They depend heavily on the specific use case, the existing process landscape and the available data and usually require an individually-built business case. We are happy to support that in a personal conversation.